The image below is a frame capture from a simple animation generated by running a single paint synthesizer water wash preset in loop action while streaming the output into an open movie stream. We will be using the wet preset as a part of a more complicated generative paint animation in tomorrow’s post. But today we’ll have a little fun and show how to use water paint effects to melt faces (and also hopefully learn something about how water paint presets are constructed).
Wet water wash paint synthesizer effects are often very useful. They can be incorporated into paint action sequences for movie processing to generate dissipative wash or feathering effects over time in rotoscoped paint animations. They are also great tools when used as secondary processing along with a gallery show technique.
Gallery show allows a second folder of favorites presets to be used at the beginning of each gallery show cycle. Incorporating a custom folder of water wash presets with something like a randomized vectorizer gallery show techniques can create exciting new effects.
The particular water wash effect we will be looking at today can almost be thought of as a type of locally selective warp effect. It takes advantage of the Brush Contract option for the Fill Algorithm parameter in the Paint Fill Apply control panel (as shown below).
The Brush Contract Fill Algorithm does not apply any paint to the canvas. It applies a contraction warp to the existing canvas based on the current brush nib. The contraction warp effect is very useful for simulating various kinds of wet paint effects, and is typically used as the 2nd algorithm in a dual fill algorithm paint preset. But since a water wash doesn’t actually apply any new paint color to an existing canvas, the Brush Contract Fill Algorithm can be used to simulate different kinds of water wash effects.
As seen in the 2nd gallery image above of the Path Shape control panel, the max path length for the paint preset is set to 1, so only a single brush nib is applied for each paint stroke. So the preset shows off the actual contraction warp effect that occurs locally within the brush nib, which as seen in the 3rd gallery image above is a 64 by 64 computational sphere. Note that the Brush Modulation control panel settings for the paint preset will modulate the 64×64 max source brush down to a 32×32 pixel source brush nib when the preset auto-paints.
To show off the effect of repeated application of the water wash effect described above, I generated a short animation. I started by opening a new movie stream. I set the movie stream write flag to Enable Write on Op End. As seen in the 4th gallery image above, the Max Stroke setting in the Path Start control panel is set to 20, so after every 20 applications of a single brush nib running a contraction warp, a new movie frame is written out into the open movie stream.
I started the movie with a woman’s facial image, and then started the water wash preset running in loop action. You can do this either by holding down the shift key when pressing the action button, or by running the Action : Run Loop Action menu command. You press the spacebar key to stop loop action playback.
The resulting animation of a facial melt effect can be seen here. Note that the effect over time is very different than a water wash based on a vertical drip. I generated a second animation using a vertical water drip paint preset so show off the difference between the behavior of these 2 different kinds of water wash effects over time when applied to a single still image canvas.
For this second water drip animation I used the Default : Water : WaterDripDown1 factory paint preset. The second water drip animation can be seen here. Note how different the behavior of the repeated application of this water wash effect is when compared to the first water wash effect.
